Aftertime

Awakening in a bleak landscape, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls enduring something terrible. Having no idea how many days́or weeks́have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: her daughter, Ruthie, has vanished. And with her, nearly all of civilization. Instead of winding through the once-lush hills, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters́people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong. In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider́much less one who bears the telltale scars of a Beater attack́but she finds safety with an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. And she'll need him more than ever when his ragged band of survivors learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, weapons in a brave new world ...

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A good take on the zombie genre with some interesting twists. Though the sex scenes reveal the publisher's Harlequin background.

FangFiction
Aug 27, 2011

This is book 1 of the AFTERTIME series. In this post-apocalyptic world, global famine and massive terrorist attacks have destroyed civilization as we know it. The electrical grid is down, water systems have been destroyed, and communication networks are a thing of the past. Bioterrorism has killed most of the world's vegetation and animals, leaving the surviving humans to exist on a diet of Kaysev, a laboratory-created plant that provides the bare essentials necessary to maintain life. In its last official act, the U.S. government sent Air Force planes to blanket the entire country with Kaysev seeds so that the population would not starve to death. Unfortunately, due to either ineptitude or sabotage, a poisonous seed—blue leaf—was mixed in with the Kaysev seeds, and people who eat blue leaf turn into zombiesque, flesh-eating monsters called Beaters. The story follows Cass Dollar, a recovering addict who is searching for her young daughter, who disappeared after Cass was attacked by the Beaters—and (incredibly) survived in normal human form. Although this is a very dark series, I am enjoying it for its fresh and inventive take on post-apocalyptic times. The Kaysev concept is great—and very well thought out. The seed mix-up seems like a plausible bureaucratic snafu, and I can convince myself that it really could happen. Also interesting are the three different societies that are portrayed: the downtrodden but independent survivors living in the Box, the resilient but fanatical extremists of the Convent, and the burgeoning but oppressive new society of the rebuilders. If you like dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, you'll enjoy this series.